October 2009
38 posts
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Other Scorpios. →
That handsome devil and Louisiana gadabout Mills marks his 29th birthday today — stop by one of his online homes and pass on your best wishes.
When I first made the decision to use Tumblr as a blogging platform a year ago, I had some misgivings. Everything seemed so short and so ephemeral! Mills’s tumblelog was the only one that I knew of in those early days that seemed to think it...
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Invariably used without permission.
A few years ago Nate came up for a visit, and we were at the Half Price Books in St. Louis Park. Nate was stocking up on Henry Roth paperbacks or whatever, and I was perusing a very handsome three-hundred page hardcover volume on Tijuana bibles. We’d been in the store for about an hour, and it was about time to leave.
“What’s that?” asked Nate.
“Oh, it’s a...
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ACTUALLY, I DON’T HAVE ANY FRIENDS: The Wonderful... →
For Halloween Week at Filmosophy, a wildly unreasonable short essay on one of my favorite movies of all time.
There are a lot of trashy made-for-cable horror flicks out there, but there is only one where a socially awkward Persian genie kills Tiny Lister in a mystical prison dance-off and then possesses his body in order to bust his secret Russian boyfriend out of Los Angeles County Jail. That...
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Top three memories associated with Freddy...
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Testing.
Blah blah blah, look at me, I’m S. 12th, everyone! I screw up the flow of your dashboard with a bunch of long, boring posts full of run-on sentences that go on for nineteen paragraphs…
…and you’re stuck with all of it.
Until now! It looks like you can skip it with the “read more” feature? Wow, great! I guess!
Should I use this new feature? Or do you want the...
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"To the east WELCOME, to the west WELCOME..."
Here is an excerpt from a reader’s (presumably negative) two-star customer review of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America in Arabic Farsi (thanks, Age of Dhool!). If anyone speaks Arabic Farsi, I would love to know what specifically is being singled out for criticism.
صید قزل آلا در آمریکا نوشته ریچارد براتیگان یک رمان پست مدرن است. براتیگان در این اثر که شاهکار او محسوب می...
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“In particular, the numbers have been critiqued…for their depiction of...”
– An excerpt from the Wikipedia article on Busby Berkeley (needing a citation, of course). Socialism is everywhere!
I spent a few lazy hours yesterday afternoon being indoctrinated into collectivism by watching 42nd Street and Footlight Parade, the latter of which contained this water number that...
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Nick Lowe, “Marie Provost.” Further...
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A funny, interesting conversation I overheard on a...
Passenger 1: Well, gathering business cards and e-mail addresses is great—if those resources are used effectively. With LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter—we HR consultants are faced with ever-increasing opportunities to network and make important business connections.
Passenger 2: But these networking tools do not take the place of a well-designed database.
Passenger 1: The best business is repeat business. One of the most important assets for any HR consultant is a list of customers.
Passenger 2: Yeah, it's imperative that you maintain a database of customers, contacts, referral sources and vendors. In addition to serving as a source of important information on clients, as the database grows it becomes a rich source of information that can be mined to identify trends and opportunities.
Passenger 1: I agree. While social networks allow us to maintain client lists and to communicate with those in their network, these tools generally do not allow client information to be exported for any type of external communications.
Passenger 2: E-mail newsletters, holiday cards, or invoicing.
Passenger 1: Right. Social sites all have a place, but are best used as an end point to gather information to incorporate into a main database for all customer, vendor and relationship information. Not all customers and vendors will be members of a specific community.
Passenger 2: Of course not. Pressuring them to join a community as part of a marketing strategy is foolhardy at best.
Passenger 1: Then again, referencing that the customer or prospect is a member of a certain community in an internal database can provide additional information and marketing value. By monitoring which, if any, social networking sites prospects and clients use, we can gain insights into how responsive they are to these communication tools.
Passenger 2: Yes! These sites can offer lots of additional value to HR. I upload my contact database to LinkedIn, and because it is easy to use, you can build a list of testimonials easily and non-confrontationally and you can easily add the LinkedIn icon/hyperlink to your signature, showing you have awareness of the power of social networking.
Passenger 1: In the beginning, there is no need to invest a lot of time or money in a database. A simple spreadsheet application is an easy and familiar tool for capturing basic information.
Passenger 2: And you can add as many columns as you like to collect all sorts of information on your contacts.
Passenger 1: It doesn’t matter if the database is a simple predefined Microsoft Access database, Microsoft Outlook address books or something as scalable as SQL Server or Oracle— having that information available in one place for adding, editing and changing can have a profound effect on a company’s customer resource management.
Passenger 2: You said it. As HR consultants find their lists of contacts growing, a simple spreadsheet might no longer meet their needs. You'll will probably find that database software specifically designed for client management will make searching through large numbers of contacts much easier
Passenger 1: Software packages specifically designed for contact management can make it much easier to create reports and general mailing lists as well.
Passenger 2: There are a couple of different options when it comes to the software to use to manage their client and prospect lists. One option is to use software that resides on their computers.
Passenger 1: Of course, if you're keeping the information on your computer, be sure you keep your anti-virus software current and keep frequent back-ups somewhere other than on your computer, especially if using a laptop.
Passenger 2: There can be benefits to using a hosted service where the software is accessed over the Internet.
Passenger 1: An online contact management system is generally more mobile, as it can be accessed from any computer with access to the Internet and frequently from mobile phones, as well.
Passenger 2: I recommend web-based CRMs because then you can have access from home, when you work from home, and they almost always sync to a smart phone. When looking for a web-based option, look for one that has permission-based systems so multiple people can view the database, each with a specific and different set of rights.
Passenger 1: Yes. Where did you go to college again?
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You: Wait a second, Andy! This conversation isn't funny or interesting! It's really, really boring! And it keeps going on and on!
S. 12th: Well, reader, welcome to Midwest Airlines flight 2110, departing from Milwaukee with nonstop service to Minneapolis-St. Paul. Because I was stuck in front of this conversation for the whole flight. I couldn't even focus on finally finishing "Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954" because Passengers 1 and 2 were so loud, and the big, sad, creepy ending was totally ruined because I kept hearing words like "scalable" creep into the text.
You: You have suffered terribly, Andy.
S. 12th: I just want that acknowledgement.
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"Dr. Lindsey Brigman's heart was racing." →
South 12th will be on hiatus for the week while our entire operation is moved to our new home at southtwelfth.angelfire.com. After that time, South 12th will be focusing much less on the usual boring topics like South Minneapolis, cheap bicycles and furry hats, and much more on building what we hope will be the Web’s best selection of slash fiction related to James Cameron’s 1989 film...
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A dose of a freaky ghost baby.
Back in Louisville, there was a radio station run out a local high school across the river in New Albany. During school hours and into the early evening, the kids would operate it, taking call-in requests and playing different types of teenage-oriented music. It was almost always a lot more interesting to listen to then any of the other local stations, because teenagers, for all their hormonal...
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The Pixies Three, “Birthday Party.”
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The Wikipedia entry on "M*A*S*H," rewritten for...
…As the series progressed, it made a significant shift from being primarily a comedy to becoming far more drama-focused. By the eighth season in 2017, the writing staff had been totally overhauled, and Cougar Town displayed a different feel —consciously moving between comedy and drama, unlike the seamless integration of years gone by. While this latter era showcased some fine dramatic...
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I’m not an obnoxious person (wait, I...
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South Twelfth, or How I Stopped Being...
(Submitted by James at The Opie. You can submit, too! Or by email!)
The first time I grew a beard, a few years ago, it was a scraggily and awkward thing. I grew it mostly just to prove to myself that I could actually fill the non-chin parts of my face with hair. I wore it for a month or so, and then shaved it off. My second attempt at growing a beard happened to provide an important detail for a...
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South Twelfth Brought the Class to Minneapolis
(submitted by Deborah at Fight with Knives. You can submit, too!)
Even if it had to be imported from Louisville. What I like most about South Twelfth is that it transcends blogginess and Internet ephemera and pervades your day-to-day doings. You start examining pieces of mail, restaurant menus, bus schedules, and the south Minneapolis streets and thinking, “Now, what would South Twelfth [a...
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“Generation after generation. It’s their bloodline, man. Every generation,...”
– The man behind me on the 21 this morning, invoking Horace (“For the sins of your fathers you, though guiltless, must suffer”) and Euripides (“The gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children”). One of the more sweeping, epic insults I have ever heard on a bus.
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"He's here to fill your kopfs mit lies!"
A few weeks ago I went to Oak Street Cinema to see The Baader-Meinhof Complex. Since I work right in the neighborhood, I headed over to buy tickets early, even though the screening wasn’t for another hour or so. The front doors were still closed when I arrived at the theater. I stood outside a moment, trying to figure out if I should come back, when a person in the lobby saw me and walked...
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Blue Cheer, “Summertime Blues.” I love...
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Food delivery drivers are the only people that can...
The drivers from the Italian place on 35th Street always have 612 numbers. They’re usually students at South High, kids that live in the neighborhood with their parents.
A lot of the drivers from the pizza place in Seward near the University tend to have outstate area codes — 218, 507. A few 605s or 715s, and occasionally a couple as far east as 608, 847 or 920. These are mostly...
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Since it’s been a dreary, rainy week (here...
Please enjoy this obligatory "Who let the cultural...
Although you’ve already read this, I was really honored to have South 12th singled out this week as one of METRO magazine’s METRO 100 (along with the Common Room exhibition, a collaboration with Sergio Vucci and The Soap Factory). Congratulations to everyone else!
I was also delighted to receive an invitation to the METRO 100 party last night, but was unable to attend, because I was...
